The Beginner’s Guide To CVR Marketing

In the world of digital marketing, CVR stands for Conversion Rate or Conversion Ratio. It’s a key performance indicator for digital advertising campaigns, mobile applications, and commercial websites. It looks like this:

(Total Conversions / Total Impressions) * 100

The word “conversion” refers to the completion of a final and desired outcome. To be considered a conversion, a transaction must be completed. Actions that demonstrate intent to convert like adding items to a cart or hitting a payment details page do not qualify as a conversion and do not affect your product’s CVR. Only after details have been approved and the order placed can it be considered a conversion.

The term “conversion” doesn’t always refer to financial transactions. Marketers tasked with generating leads use it to refer the successful collection of a prospect’s contact details. A lead generation campaign’s CVR would therefore refer to the percentage of an audience that submitted their contact details after being exposed to an offer or prompt. Context will determine the term’s exact meaning, but you’re typically safe in assuming that it refers to a prospect’s successful completion of a marketing funnel.

Being a percentage, CVRs can range from 0 to 100. A CVR of 0 would mean that nobody who saw the prompt, visited the site, or used the app delivered any sort of tangible value. That’s not to definitively say that they didn’t deliver value by referring others into the funnel. They just didn’t move through it themselves. A CVR of 100 means that everyone that was exposed to it moved through the funnel to completion.

CVR marketing is the art of improving conversion rates in your digital marketing campaigns. It refers to efforts to ensure prospects have been prepped, value has been communicated, and calls-to-action have been optimized. CVR marketing initiatives are considered successful when they result in more sales/leads/desired outcomes. A focused CVR marketing initiative is not concerned with virality, average order size, or even necessarily ROI. All of those variables, while certainly fundamental to a successful campaign, operate in concert with CVR marketing to maximize revenue and increase net revenue.

How To Improve Your Campaign’s CVR
Listed here are a few low/no cost ways for CVR marketers to optimize their campaigns for maximum conversion.

Keep Copy Approachable
Effective campaigns typically don’t include too much industry-specific jargon. While insider-speak and acronyms may seem like a good way to directly address your audience, they run the risk of alienating the substantial number of viewers who may still be learning the fundamentals of your vertical. CVR marketing best practice is to use longform language wherever possible and abstain from shop talk in your campaign headlines and body copy. If you must include acronyms, experts suggest keeping it to one for every ten words. Any more and your ads may come off sounding inhuman, which is never an effective way to capture an audience’s attention.

Use Clear Calls-To-Action
The most effective calls-to-action start with a commanding, imperative verb. They provide your audience with instruction on what to do next as well as clear and unambiguous expectations for what will happen when they do. Phrases like “Download Now”, “Place Your Order” or “Complete Your Registration” check all of these boxes. Avoid abstract language like “Get An Edge” or “Dive In” when choosing your CTAs. Their meanings may seem obvious to you but there’s a significant opportunity for misunderstanding when you start delivering campaigns at scale. If injecting brand voice into your CTAs is important, pick from a list of the most commonly occurring words in your particular language. For English speakers, the Oxford English Corpus is an invaluable asset if you can convince the University Press to grant you access. Free lists like this one about the 1000 most common words in the English language are an effective alternative.

Practice Good Button Design
The design specifics of your CTA buttons play a significant role in convincing your audience to convert. The most effective ones emulate buttons in the physical world. They’re almost always round or rectangular with rounded edges. This is with good reason. Psychological research has proven humans to have an intuitive aversion to points like those found in triangles or even hard right-angles, as they’re often associated with threats when found in nature. Our brains have an easier time processing shapes with rounded edges. They also inherently draw our eyes inward to their contents. For an even greater effect, many designers use border color and drop shadow to create the illusion of depth, emulating the way a button would appear in a three-dimensional space.

A/B Test
A marketer’s best bet for success is to get scientific. A/B tests, also known as split tests or multivariate tests, let marketers pit two or more versions of the same campaign against each other in a winner-take-all conversion brawl. Each campaign version is allotted a certain percentage of the total target audience. These are most often equal percentages, for the sake of determining a clear winner, but they can be uneven in unique cases. Impressions for all versions are then delivered to their discreet audience segments and performance data like click-through rate and CVR are collected to determine a winner. That version of the campaign is then pushed to the entire audience or advances to participate in another round of tests. Most major advertising platforms (like Facebook) offer native support for multivariate testing so marketers can take the guesswork out of their CVR marketing initiatives.

At Tenjin, we’re all about making life easier for mobile marketers. Our comprehensive growth infrastructure unites all the things mobile marketers care about most. That includes advertising attribution, app analytics, and everything else you need to determine your exact ROI for each and every user. To learn more, sign up for free or email us at sales@tenjin.io. We hope you found these tips useful, and we wish you the best of luck with all your CVR marketing efforts!